Freeze Frame: The WSW roundtable discussion
Take 1 (3D films, video-on-demand, movies for adults)
Take 2 (Best Picture voting, int'l marketing, Bridesmaids)
Take 3 (Netflix, SONY's 3D glasses deal, Oscars)
Take 4 (Brett Ratner, 35mm film, Oscars)
Take 5 (SOPA, movie criticism, Best Pic voting)
Take 6 (The Hunger Games, Bully, re-releases)
A few words about Gibson's 'Beaver' trailer
Take 1 (3D films, video-on-demand, movies for adults)
Take 2 (Best Picture voting, int'l marketing, Bridesmaids)
Take 3 (Netflix, SONY's 3D glasses deal, Oscars)
Take 4 (Brett Ratner, 35mm film, Oscars)
Take 5 (SOPA, movie criticism, Best Pic voting)
Take 6 (The Hunger Games, Bully, re-releases)
A few words about Gibson's 'Beaver' trailer
...I still believe it's the work that matters in the end. Why? Because as creative people, we like to believe that our work will outlive us...
...the Parents Television Council loses all credibility when they say they haven't seen Blue Valentine, because as I've said before, context matters...
...it may be true that we've become a society of otakus, but let's be honest: some geeks will always be cooler than others...
On Oscar and diversity...It's to the writers' credit that the issue of diversity in Hollywood in general and the Oscars in specific was at the forefront of their minds...
The argument for 'Toy Story 3'
How to manage this summer's blockbuster slate
...you know that not all of these movies are gonna rule. And even if you do have money to burn on all of them, every week, is that a wise investment of not only your money, but your time?...
Oscar 2010: My predictions
Oscar 2010: The winners
Exploring movie podcasts
AFFRM to launch 'Follow' this weekend ...AFFRM comes at an appropriate time. With black actors finding it harder to maintain a presence in mainstream films, black films in general will become harder to find, so there's a lot riding on the success of this program...
Fairy tale movies that probably won't get madeSo it looks like fairy tales are the new superheroes. Well, anything for a quick buck, I suppose, although I'll say this much: fairy tales, at least, have historically been extremely mutable from one generation of storytellers to another...
Could variable ticket-pricing work?
...There'll be complaining, naturally, but once people realize that the system will benefit those who order early, I think it could work out over time...
...there are some more fundamental issues with the moviegoing experience that I feel need to be addressed if theaters - and by extension, studios - want more patrons...
Can a woman be sexy and "empowered" too?
...why does there have to be a disconnect between the way a female character acts and the way she looks? These are action movies we're talking about here, so they're fantasies to a certain degree anyway..
Thank you, Alamo Drafthouse, for giving a damn
...I think it's a perfectly fair question to ask: if The Help had been written by a black author, would we see the same level of success?...
Gibson speaks
...if this were an isolated incident, I might consider giving him the benefit of the doubt when he says that the things he said did not reflect how he really feels. But this is hardly an isolated incident, is it?...
...Kathryn Bigelow's record speaks for itself; I trust her to make a great movie about this that will, perhaps, serve as a companion piece to The Hurt Locker...
AFFRM's DuVernay: POCs are part of indie film too
...A lot can be learned from DuVernay and AFFRM, and it's about time more people in the industry took notice.
National Bike Month is a time to celebrate the benefits of bicycling. As gas prices continue to rise, and as the search for oil continues to wreck the environment, it has become more imperative than ever to encourage alternate means of transportation that reduces our dependency on oil...
Five more directors for Lars von Trier to obstruct
...I haven't seen the first Five Obstructions film, but the idea behind it - coming up with different ways to make the same movie - does seem like a fun experiment, the sort of thing you might encounter in film school, perhaps...
Who will preserve the treasures of film history?
...It's a mighty poor reflection on Hollywood that [Debbie] Reynolds was the only one interested in creating a public venue for such a remarkable collection of items that not only represent an art form, but connect us to our cultural past...
The big sleep: Do 'boring' movies have value?
...I think making the effort to step outside one's comfort zone is important in and of itself, even if one doesn't end up liking the film in the end. One's tastes are one's tastes, and one shouldn't have to apologize for them, even in the face of nose-in-the-air critics...
...What bothers me about this is the fact that the Academy still feels the need to tinker with what should be a simple process. And why? Because fewer people seem to care about the Oscar show itself - and why should they?...
'Kinyarwanda' is AFFRM's second release!
The state of performance-capture filmmaking
...while I don't doubt that it must be difficult to look past all the hardware, on that level it seems to me that it must be little different than working a scene with someone in heavy makeup, playing an alien or an older version of their character or someone with a deformity. Either way, latex or hardware, your goal is still the same - to focus on your partner and react to what he's doing...
...Jackson Heights would be a good place to base it - centrally located within the borough, lots of buses and trains all around, plenty of commercial business - but Astoria would put it much closer to Manhattan, not to mention the proximity to the Museum of the Moving Image. Not sure which neighborhood I'd go with...
Is the only good comedy a raunchy one?
...I suppose if I were to see The Hangover, I'd laugh. Perhaps not as much as other people, but I'm sure I would. Still, I never felt the desire to rush right out and see it or any other comedy like it from the past several years...
Classic movies in their proper context
Brow-beating
...First of all, let's tell it like it is: what we're talking about here are "awards bait" movies, the kind of films that - intentionally or not - appear to be made specifically to win Oscars and Golden Globes and what have you because they make Hollywood feel good about itself...
...As the creator, he wants his work to be the best it can be. If he feels that it isn't, and if he has the power to do something about it, isn't that his prerogative as an artist?...
Five reasons why 'Potter' probably won't get a Best Pic nom
...Actors make up the single largest voting bloc in the Academy by a ratio of greater than three to one, and over the course of seven prior films, not one Potter actor has gotten nominated... If these guys couldn't get nominated after seven films, why would they get nominated now?...
The frog prince: The legacy of Jim Henson
...The Muppet Show stood up favorably to the popular sitcoms of the day, and in some ways, surpassed them, and credit for that has to go to the visionary artist responsible for it, Jim Henson...
Five film blogs I've been reading lately
Five things SONY can pay for instead of 3D glasses
'Avengers' will be a fanboy's dream come true
...Because I grew up reading Marvel Comics, these characters meant a lot to me, so of course seeing them on the big screen was exciting. This, though, is a little different...
Five juvenile ways to get adults to see 'Shame'
Fox Searchlight... is prepared to put its money where its mouth is by not only accepting the NC-17 rating the MPAA slapped onto the controversial Michael Fassbender movie Shame, but using it as a selling point...
...Now it's not even
like I'm all that picky when it comes to Broadway shows, because like I
said, I don't go to very many of them, but these days, I have even less
of an incentive to see one. Why? Because chances are, I've already seen
it - on the silver screen!...
...If other geeks like Samuel L. Jackson and Simon Pegg can cash in on their fanboy status with good roles in good movies like Unbreakable and Paul, then why can't Murphy find better geek roles?...
C'mon, who among us hasn't thought about this at one point or another in their lives? Especially as film fans?...
Five theories why Katherine Heigl is a leading lady
I'm only half-joking with this post. While my original intent was to have some fun with this topic, the truth is that the more I think about it, the more it bothers me, because something like this seems to defy conventional wisdom...
What was it about that song?
...The Bodyguard did not fare well with the critics. Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman called it "an outrageous piece of saccharine kitsch" and the New York Times' Janet Maslin called it a "long, sprawling semi-travelogue," but audiences loved it enough to make it the seventh-highest grossing film of 1992. (And good or bad, it deserves props for not making a big deal about the interracial aspect of the romance.) And then there was that soundtrack. And that song...
...Callahan's book goes straight to the heart of Stanwyck's long and distinguished career and analyzes her films in depth, grouping them in specific categories - her noirs, her Westerns, her films with Frank Capra, etc. Some films obviously get more scrutiny than others - an entire chapter is devoted to Stella Dallas, for instance - but in each case Callahan discusses the pros and cons of each film as well as his thoughts about Stanwyck's work in each...
Oscar 2011: My predictions
Oscar 2011: The winners
...It's an environmental parable, basically, so to see such a story and such a character be used to sell SUVs, of all things, in a movie-tie-in commercial no less, is pretty much the definition of tacky....
'Restless City' picked up by AFFRM!!
...Somewhere along the way, though, I developed a resistance to the newer stuff. Maybe it's a result of getting old, I dunno, but suddenly I looked at anything new and popular (the key word here) with suspicion....
Five characters for my bizarro basketball team
Bully for us
...As a social worker, [my father] dealt with kids all the time. That's why I know he'd be quite disturbed to read about how serious the problem of bullying in school has become...
...I remember we had to work at keeping DVDs relatively clean and usable. They were rentals, so they'd be handled by who-knew-how-many different people a week. We would apply this cleaning goop to a DVD whenever somebody brought one in claiming that it wouldn't play past a certain point or whatever, which happened all the time of course because DVDs were still very much a new technology and people didn't know how to treat them properly...
...Titanic is the kind of movie that has to be seen on the big screen to get the full impact of it, and James Cameron knew that when he made it. Love him or hate him, he does not make movies for people to watch on their iPhones...
A few thoughts on Dick Clark
I'll probably remember Dick Clark more as the New Year's Eve guy than anything else. I do remember watching American Bandstand as a kid, but I can't honestly say that it was all that influential in shaping my musical tastes. I'm a child of the MTV generation...
...A fine for cell phone use is a good idea, but it would require vigilance on the part of theater staff, and not every theater has the amount of people available for the task. And ushers can't be in the theaters all the time. So why not give the audience the ability to police itself... and in a way that would not only encourage them to root out cell phone users, but actually reward them for the effort!...
Why does "car-free = loser" in movies and TV?
...for many Americans, walking or riding bikes is less feasible than driving because they live in sprawling, decentralized cities and towns with wide, straight, multi-lane streets that encourage driving at unsafe speeds, endangering the lives of pedestrians and bikers...
...for those of us of a certain generation, we first discovered comics through Marvel and DC superheroes. (For younger people, manga - Japanese comics - are the thing now.) The Avengers was one of my favorite comics for a long time, and like the X-Men, they've had a wide variety of characters over their half-century of publication...
The ethics of sneaking food into theaters
...I'm not a first-run theater owner. I'm a consumer, a customer, and I personally cannot justify paying both a full-price ticket and a seven-dollar popcorn...
Some men just want to watch the world burn
...what was shaping up to be the biggest celebration in the film world this year is now its greatest catastrophe. And the repercussions from this will be myriad, especially in this, an election year...
The Disney/Lucas deal from a Trekkie's POV
In defense of 'A Christmas Story'
Are leading men allergic to rom-coms?
SLJ dares interviewer to say 'nigger'
AFFRM needs films in other genres
5 times Trek and Wars have crossed paths
When filmmakers get thin-skinned
5 movie stars (and one director) who share my birthday
5 more classic films that could run on holidays
Living with movie posters... EVERYWHERE
'Man of Steel' must escape Reeve's shadow
Could you accept Melissa McCarthy as a romantic lead?
What a time for black filmmakers!
What was responsible for the geek renaissance?
To save the drive-in, you must destroy it
7 indie films and where to find them
Re-examining live-tweeting (however reluctantly)
7 more indie films and where to see them
Who is killing the great horror icons of cinema?
"Nothing ever ends."
An experiment with spoilers
Make Nyong'o a star, H'wood. I dare you.
5 hopes I have for Star Wars Episode VII
Who will control the Loews JC?
5 movies set at World's Fairs
Indie movies in small(er) towns
PG should not equal inferior
If everyone's a critic, then no one's a critic
Too-Heavy X-planations
Requiem for the video store, part 3: It's dead, Kim!
Play it again, Sam (and again and again)
5 horror films from my childhood
Malabar Farm: Ghosts and Hollywood (guest post)
The Princess Bride and fairness
5 recent Xmas films that aren't really about Xmas
Where will you leave Jimmy Stewart?
Just wanted to share this...
Alone at the movies?
A long life, and a prosperous one
What if more movie theaters were non-profit?
Ray Bradbury and vintage science fiction films (guest post)
5 more movie/TV characters that deserve statues
FOL wins court battle w/Jersey City!
Blyth spirit: The Jacqueline T. Lynch Q-and-A
Regal Cinemas attack symptom, not disease, with bag checks